Version 4.7 of WordPress, named “Vaughan” in honor of legendary jazz vocalist Sarah “Sassy” Vaughan, is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard. New features in 4.7 help you get your site set up the way you want it.

The history of Android on tablets is complicated. Just as Apple had done in 2007 with the first iPhone, the iPad's release in 2010 set a very high standard for the rest of the market. The next year, Google released Android 3.0 Honeycomb on the Motorola Xoom, designed specifically with tablets in mind. The Xoom wasn't the iPad killer that Motorola had hoped for, and there have been very few Android tablets that could stack up to Apple's iPad line.

C has ruled the programming world for a long period, becoming the base of many operating systems and programs. However, over the course of past one year, its popularity has fallen, probably, due to lack of any corporate sponsor and increase in the usage of newer languages.

HDD happens when a development team picks the “newest, hottest technology” to use on a project, based on how the technology is trending on Twitter, or on a number of enthusiastic blog posts or conference talks. A key symptom of HDD is that contrary to the hype, progress doesn’t speed up when the new tech is developed but just the opposite: work slows to a crawl.

With coding and software development in serious need of talent, it’s essentially a graduate’s market, but you still need the right combination of skills and attributes to beat the competition. When it comes to open source and DevOps, a deeper understanding is essential.

To this end, foundations such as the Cloud Foundry Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Open Container Initiative (OCI) at The Linux Foundation are actively bringing in new open source projects and engaging member companies to create industry standards for new cloud-native technologies. The goal is to help improve interoperability and create a stable base for container operations on which companies can safely build commercial dependencies.

Two leaders in the field of artificial intelligence have announced that they're open-sourcing their AI platforms.

After investing in building rich simulated environments to serve as laboratories for AI research, Google's DeepMind Lab on Saturday said it would open the platform for the broader research community's use.

DeepMind has been using its AI lab for some time, and it has "only barely scratched the surface of what is possible" in it, noted team members Charlie Beattie, Joel Leibo, Stig Petersen and Shane Legg in an online post.

Administering standardized tests online is trickier than it sounds. Underneath the facade of simple multiple choice forms, any workable platform needs a complex web of features to ensure that databases don’t buckle under the pressure of tens of thousands of test takers at once. On top of that, it also needs to ensure that responses are scored correctly and that it’s impossible for students to cheat.

Step back and think about it, and It's hard to believe that the OpenStack cloud computing story isn't even five years old yet. Back in 2010, Rackspace and NASA announced an effort to create a sophisticated open source cloud computing infrastructure that could compete with proprietary offerings. Since then, OpenStack has won over countless tech titans that are backing it, and has its own foundation.

Now, Red Hat is out with results from a survey that show that OpenStack production deployments more than doubled in 2016. Clearly, organizations have moved beyond the evaluation stage and are trusting this open cloud platform.

Last year, many companies were still learning about OpenStack clouds or developing proof-of-concepts. Now they are deploying OpenStack.

The latest change request coming in for Fedora 26 is to update the default C/C++ compiler flags.

The proposed changes are to add -Werror=implicit-function-declaration and -Werror=implicit-int for helping better prepare C code for future revisions to C and making the code more friendly with C++ programs. Additionally, for Fedora 26 on i686, the plan is to drop -mtune=atom. The tuning for Atom was done previously back when 32-bit Intel Atom CPUs were very common, but now less so, and many i686 Fedora packages are being installed on x86_64 and thus might run a bit faster on current hardware.

SHENZHEN I/O is the new simulator/puzzle game by Zachtronics, the creators of other excellent games like Spacechem, Infinifactory and TIS-100. After being on Early Access for some time, it's now available on Steam since November, 17th. But most importantly, even when only two weeks have passed since the official release, the game already has 'overwhelmingly positive' reviews by Steam users, just like its predecessors; out of a total 785 reviews so far, only 14 are negative against 771 positives, something truly remarkable.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently started contracting with Free Electrons to give me some support on the display side of the stack. Last week I got to review and release their first big piece of work: Boris Brezillon's code for SDTV support. I had suggested that we use this as the first project because it should have been small and self contained. It ended up that we had some clock bugs Boris had to fix, and a bug in my core VC4 CRTC code, but he got a working patch series together shockingly quickly. He did one respin for a couple more fixes once I had tested it, and it's now out on the list waiting for devicetree maintainer review. If nothing goes wrong, we should have composite out support in 4.11 (we're probably a week late for 4.10).

Eric Anholt's latest weekly blog post on the VC4 development highlights SDTV support coming together, the Raspberry Pi Foundation contracting Free Electrons to provide more development help on the display stack, HDMI audio support for VC4 DRM driver continuing to inch along, DSI fixes, some code generation improvements for VC4 Gallium3D, and other work.

We’ve all been the victim of a dropped mobile phone call and know how frustrating it can be. However, virtualized networks provide network operators with powerful tools to detect and recover from network disruptions, or “faults,” that can drop calls for thousands of subscribers simultaneously. The Open Platform for Network Functions Virtualization (OPNFV) project together with OpenStack have developed features in software that add resiliency to mobile networks and enable them to recover from network and other outages.

“My own story would not have been possible but for the democratizing force of Microsoft technology reaching me where I was growing up,” CEO Satya Nadella told shareholders this week.

But the price of that “democratizing force” is about to go up, with Britons uniquely singled out. Microsoft has reiterated to Azure customers that prices will go up by 22 per cent from January 1st.

The problem? The price rise is far greater than any exchange rate post-Brexit fluctuations might justify. Microsoft’s biggest European data centre is in Dublin, a member of the Euro currency. The Euro hovered around €1.28 to one pound for the first six months of the year, before crashing after Brexit. It’s now €1.19, a depreciation of just 9 cents, or 7 per cent.

The value of the British pound has weakened more dramatically against the US dollar, dropping by 18.9 per cent since 24 June - the day after Brits voted to leave the EU.

For new Office or Azure cloud customers in the UK, no exchange rate can justify any price rise at all. In September, Microsoft made Azure available in UK data centres.

What happens if your startup can't afford one of these proprietary solutions or you need customized features? You go look for an open source alternative that could open the space for new solutions and modules. Here are four peer-to-peer marketplaces that are working to become the Wordpress or Prestashop of their kind.

Back in 2014, public exposure of the OpenSSL Heartbleed security bug created a stage for security experts and commentators to field opinions on the open source error that left an estimated two thirds of the internet unsecured. We followed up back then with a guest post for OStatic from Eren Niazi, founder of Open Source Storage, where he discussed the security implications for the open source community.

In a reinforcement of his company’s marketing message that containerization as an architecture is more secure by design, Docker Inc. CEO Ben Golub [pictured right above, with HPE Executive VP Antonio Neri] told attendees at HPE’s Discover London 2016 event last Tuesday morning that the Docker platform addresses and ameliorates its users’ security concerns just by its very architecture.

Open-source innovation is making the traditional patent system obsolete. Michigan Technological University associate professor Joshua Pearce and his team work with what is called open-source hardware development.

“What that means is sort of developing technologies that don’t rely on patents,” Pearce said. “We work collaboratively with engineers and scientists all over the world, and (it’s) fairly successful. And the reason it’s successful is because if you have thousands of people working on something, it tends to get pretty good pretty fast.”

Pearce said the concept began some time ago with open-source software.

The high-tech vision of open-source software meets low-tech design at non-profit organization OHorizons, an international coalition of innovators working to solve persistent global challenges. The team’s most recent invention is the open-source Wood Mold, designed to allow even the least experienced person to create a BioSand Filter that can deliver clean water at 1/10th of the cost of the traditional method. The Wood Mold is designed to be accessible by anyone who has the DIY, open-source construction manual that OHorizons offers for free online.

The popularity of open source DBMSs, as measured by the DB-Engines Ranking, has reached a new record. So, we're going to analyze the underlying details.

We have 154 open source systems in our ranking, slightly less than the 156 commercial systems. If we add up the popularity scores of all the open source systems, we get 46% of the overall scores, whereas 54% goes to commercial systems.

Overall the Nouveau DRM updates for Linux 4.10 are significant after they missed out on any feature changes for Linux 4.9. Given all the churn, there's been a last minute pull into DRM-Next of some more fixes and other minor activity.

NVIDIA has confirmed that their next proprietary driver update for Linux will introduce support for Vulkan rendering outside of the X.Org Server.

With NVIDIA's current Vulkan Linux driver it's not possible to achieve headless Vulkan rendering if the X.Org Server isn't running, but that limitation is said to be addressed by their next (post-375) driver release.

Today, December 5, 2016, Collabora's Emil Velikov proudly announced the release and immediate availability of the fifth and last scheduled maintenance update of the Mesa 12.0 3D Graphics Library for GNU/Linux distributions.

As Chair of the Architecture Group of The Linux Foundation’s CE Working Group, Tim Bird has long been the amiable public face of the Embedded Linux Conferences, which he has run for over a decade. At the recent ELC Europe event in Berlin, Bird gave a “Status of Embedded Linux” keynote in which he discussed the good news in areas like GPU support and virtually mapped kernel stacks, as well as the slow progress in boot time, system size, and other areas that might help Linux compete with RTOSes in IoT leaf nodes.

T-Firefly is Kickstartering the first hacker SBC with Rockchip’s Cortex-A72/-A53 RK3399. The Firefly-RK3399 has up to 4GB DDR3, M.2, and USB 3.0 Type-C.

T-Firefly, which offers Linux- and Android-ready open source boards like the Firefly-RK3288 and sandwich-style Firefly-RK3288 Reload, both of which are based on the quad-core, Cortex-A17 Rockchip RK3288, has advanced to a more powerful Rockchip SoC for its new open spec Firefly-RK3399. The hexa-core Rockchip RK3399 features two server-class Cortex-A72 cores clocked to up to 2.0GHz, as well as four Cortex-A53 at up to 1.42GHz. This appears to be the first RK3399 SBC and the first SBC to include Cortex-A72 cores.

Whether you plan to work on a book, a screenplay, or better structure your dissertation, you’ll probably see apps like Scrivener recommended. If you’re running Windows, macOS or even Android then you’re spoilt for choice, with various competing proprietary apps at varying price points readily available. On Linux the choices are somewhat limited.

Version 0.98 of the GNOME-aligned GStreamer-powered Pitivi non-linear video editor was tagged today as the newest development milestone.

The main feature addition of Pitivi 0.98 is now supporting customizable keyboard supports! Aside from finally supporting customizable keyboard shortcuts for this open-source video editor, a lot of warnings were fixed from GTK 3.22, and there has been a lot of other bug fixing. Bugs around Pitivi's timeline were primarily targeted by this release.

Phoronix Test Suite 6.8.0 is now available as the latest version of our open-source, fully-automated, reproducible benchmarking software for Linux, BSD, Solaris, macOS, Windows, and other operating systems.

Vivaldi's Ruarí Ødegaard informs us about the availability of a new snapshot for the cross-platform, Chromium-based Vivaldi web browser, which promises to let users name tab stacks.

Vivaldi Snapshot 1.6.682.3 marks the beginning of the development of Vivaldi 1.6, the next major version of the popular web browser, and it looks like it has been rebased on Chromium 55.0.2883.64. Besides fixing a bunch of regressions, the new development release implements an option under Settings -> Tabs -> Tab Features -> Tab stacking -> Allow Tab Stack Renaming, which lets you rename or name tab stacks.

Security experts consider the aging FTP and Telnet protocols unsafe, and HP has decided to clamp down on access to networked printers through the remote-access tools.

Some of HP's new business printers will, by default, be closed to remote access via protocols like FTP and Telnet. However, customers can activate remote printing access through those protocols if needed.

The face of cybercrime is changing. Healthcare has gone from a declared mission of stealing personal data to much more disruptive issues. In fact, healthcare has seen the largest jump in ransomware attacks than in any other industry.

When Joel Brenner opened the HIMSS Privacy & Security Forum in Boston Monday morning, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology research fellow - who focuses on cybersecurity, privacy and intelligence policy - and former senior counsel at the National Security Agency, didn’t sugarcoat the state of healthcare security.

The government isn’t going to sort out that problem until we suffer some great losses, Brenner said.

A new Google program aimed at continuously fuzzing open source software has already detected over 150 bugs.

The program, OSS-Fuzz, currently in beta mode, is designed to help unearth programming errors in open source software via fuzz testing. Fuzz testing, or fuzzing is when bits of randomly generated code is inputted into programs as a means to discover code and security flaws.

Chrome 55, released earlier this week, now blocks all Adobe Flash content by default, according to a plan set in motion by Google engineers earlier this year.

Back in May, Google's staff announced that starting with Q4 2016, Chrome would use HTML5 by default, while Flash would be turned off.

While some of the initial implementation details of the "HTML5 By Default" plan changed since May, Flash has been phased out in favor of HTML5 as the primary technology for playing multimedia content in Chrome.

A few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Linux kernel 4.8.13 and Linux kernel 4.4.37 LTS maintenance updates.
While many rolling GNU/Linux distributions have just received the Linux 4.8.12 kernel, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.13 is now available with more improvements and bug fixes, but it's not a major milestone. According to the appended shortlog and the diff since last week's Linux 4.8.12 kernel release, a total of 46 files were changed, with 214 insertions and 95 deletions.

openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio reports on the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies that landed in the repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system.

What Is A VPN Connection? Why To Use VPN?

We all have heard about VPN sometime. Most of us normal users of internet use it. To bypass the region based restrictions of services like Netflix or Youtube ( Yes, youtube has geo- restrictions too). In fact, VPN is actually mostly used for this purpose only. ​

The Libreboot C201 from Minifree is really really really ridiculously open source

Open source laptops – ones not running any commercial software whatsoever – have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.
The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source and to avoid closed software the company has added an Atheros Wi-Fi dongle with open source drivers rather than use the built-in Wi-Fi chip.